College basketball returns with eye on lucrative March Madness
Experts: With money on the line, there’s no stopping hoops
As the college basketball world descended upon Mohegan Sun in Uncasville on Thanksgiving week, the earth was moving for coaches, athletes and college administrators.
A surge in COVID-19 cases across the country was shutting down basketball programs and forcing the organizers of Mohegan Sun’s “Bubbleville” site to schedule games on the fly. From the No. 2-ranked Baylor men’s team traveling from Texas to the No. 3-ranked UConn women’s team based just up the road from the casino, programs were quarantining amid positive COVID-19 tests and games were being postponed as the week began.
Yet as the Nov. 25 start of the Mohegan Sun basketball bubble arrived, college hoops were back and event organizers were executing a plan — teams were rolling into the facility, an estimated 5,000 COVID-19 tests were ready to be used, security was monitoring the comings and goings of the visitors and games were played in the arena. Games on TV, games that will help build a postseason bracket.
Pandemic be damned, the NCAA was staging college basketball.
Why the urgency to march ahead to March Madness? Follow the money.
“Is money a driving force?”
said Gil Fried, professor of sports management at the University of New Haven. “Heck, yeah.”
The need to play is twofold, but revenue is the common denominator.
In the short term, there’s a desire to provide content for sports networks paying lucrative media rights fees to college conferences. In the long term, the NCAA Tournament looms and the industry needs to stage some form of a regular season as a preamble for the March Madness payday.
After losing the tournament last spring, the financial picture is dire. CBS Sports and Turner provide close to $1 billion per year to the NCAA for the rights to television the men’s NCAA Tournament.
“From a revenue standpoint, you obviously want to preserve your television in particular,” said Lee Berke, a New York-based sports media consultant and former executive at MSG Network. “You want to preserve the NCAA Tournament this time around. That’s a major hit. It’s major funding for the NCAA. It’s major funding for all of the conferences that have substantial basketball programs. So they’re going to try like crazy to make that happen.”
Football, the economic engine for college sports, has been staging a season with varying degrees of success. Each week has brought a wave of cancellations or postponements, often involving some of the most high-profile programs in the country.
Yet the pressure to play has been intense. When a Clemson player tested positive last weekend, the school’s medical staff was unable to agree on a plan to play with the staff from Florida State. So the game was postponed.
Yet Dabo Swinney, coach of No. 4 Clemson, lashed out at Florida State administrators and said COVID was merely used as an “excuse to cancel the game.”
On Friday, the Gonzaga men’s basketball program — ranked No. 1 in the country — went ahead and played against Auburn even though a player tested positive for the coronavirus. The players reportedly tested positive after Gonzaga played Kansas on Thursday in Fort Myers, Florida, yet the team went ahead and played Auburn on Friday.
Two players (one with a positive test, one who was in close proximity to the teammate) were held out of the game.
Contrast that decision with how UConn has navigating positive tests inside both the men’s and womens’ program. Geno Auriemma’s program is currently in quarantine and is prevented from competing in its first four scheduled games, including games inside the Mohegan Sun bubble.
The men’s program paused all activity for two weeks during the preseason because of a positive test. The program returned to the court six days before the regular-season opener against Central Connecticut State, a 102-75 win at Gampel Pavilion on Wednesday.
But coach Dan Hurley was critical of his team, attributing the performance to the lack of preparation due to the shutdown. Losing 12 practices and leaving his team with just a week to prepare was untenable and “something has got to give in terms of the way that we’re going to deal moving forward.”
“I know everyone wants their sports,” Hurley said. “Everyone wants college basketball back. We desperately want it back. I know the networks want the programming.”
Fried, the UNH professor, takes the point a step further.
“Networks need the content,” he said. “That’s why we have this growth of (football) bowl games. People are looking for quality sports. If they can bring college basketball back, that’s quality content.”
It’s also worth remembering that TV rights packages have helped fuel growth in college athletics, with the Department of Education estimating an overall rise in revenue from $3 billion in 2003 to $14 billion in 2018.
Yet the financial model was fragile even before the pandemic hit. Schools such as UConn were reporting losses in athletic departments, leading to cutbacks as the COVID-19 shutdown arrived.
The cancellation of the men’s basketball 2020 NCAA Tournament pulled millions away from the NCAA, conferences and schools, adding stress to an already-fragile industry.
Smith College sports economic professor Andrew Zimbalist believes the crisis could enable the college sports industry to re-evaluate its financial model.
“I think this will have a lasting impact in the sense that programs, particularly at the FBS level in Division I, are realizing that they had an enormous amount of waste and frivolous spending that was going on and they’re cutting back from that,” Zimbalist said. “That kind of austerity that they’re learning now is something that will stay with them, at least in part. Maybe there will be some hesitation around paying coaches $8 million a year and giving them golden parachutes of $20 million or $30 million or whatever.
“So I think in that sense, the old maxim of ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste,’ I think that lesson is being learned and will have some salutary or positive effects going forward.”
Zimbalist points out that the vast majority of schools have dealt with revenue loss through cutting or furloughing personnel and by reducing spending, and not by cutting sports. UConn announced in June that it was eliminating four sports (men’s tennis, swimming and diving, cross country and women’s rowing programs) in reaction to a mandate for the athletic department to cut 25 percent of its $42 million university subsidy over the next three years, but the department’s financial woes were unfolding long before the pandemic.
But beyond the individual schools and conferences, the NCAA is facing its own set of challenges.
“The NCAA itself as an organization is in deep trouble,” Zimbalist said. “They get 90, 95 percent of their revenue from March Madness, which was canceled last year and it’s unclear to what extent they’ll be able to go forward with it this year. … If they have to cancel or scale back the March tournament, they’re going to be in deep water. I don’t know how they’re going to get through it.”
If there is March Madness, it will be in a bubble in Indianapolis. The women’s tournament is also expected to be staged at one site.
But it’s unclear how a tournament field will be selected, given the possibility that games are limited by shutdowns.
Still, the financial incentive is too great.
“The NCAA and the conferences will do everything possible to preclude another shutdown,” Berke said. “I think that is workable. I don’t see a second year without a tournament. You might see an interesting set of procedures in how you choose the teams to get there, but I think there will be a tournament nonetheless because it is critical for the funding for all of these organizations, all of these schools, all of these conferences and the NCAA itself.”
And beyond the pandemic? “They’re not going away,” Zimbalist said. “Sports are popular. As long as the demand is there to sustain the activity, you can count on the activity still being around. I think that’s true for college sports. Hopefully it will be leaner and meaner and they’ll have more academic integrity, but those are different problems. … But I don’t think the NCAA is going to look the same five years from now.”